Yes, This is the third time I have attempted to remake this old project of mine.Yes, I am also aware of my track record for failing to release stuff I'm working on.

Now that we have that bit of unpleasant details out of the way I think a basic overview is in order.

You are the chief of security at a remote research facility near the polar caps on the recently terraformed planet of Venus, having been assigned to anew project to create an alternate form of teleportation technology that canallow the user to go anywhere in space-time, including other time periods andeven other universes. Things seems to going perfectly, but perfect never lasts...

as you were taking your daily hike you briefly hear the alarms from the baseand a radio message, A demonic invasion of the base has begun!

you immediately drop what you're doing, whip out your service pistol and rushback to base, hoping to stop the demons before they get their claws on thetechnology.

This iteration of The Edge of Time is not like any of the prior iterations oreven like any other mod at all due to certain odd bits of gameplay decisions,which I shall be listing here

A rather unique scoring system coded by Zhs2 and PhantomBeta, where you get a random powerup once you get the amount to trigger a score bonus, inspired by the scoring system used in classic Konami arcade games

Deployable inventory items, including fan favourites such as the Morph Ovum, an improved Flechette and cool new items such as the Golden Medikit, the Frost Ovum,carryable Radsuits and Nightvision Goggles

Coins and Treasure items you can collect to add to your score to trigger score bonuses

New AI for certain vanilla enemies to spice things up a bit, as well as a few new foes

New Weapons, perfect for rising to the challenge!

New Maps made just for the mod

I don't think I say much else about this mod of mine, as I consider it to be currently in an alpha state. Also the credits are currently stored away in .txt files inside the mod'smain .PK3 file since I have not yet gotten around to making a bunch of CREDIT pics andthe contents of the mod itself is subject to change, stuff that might appear in the modright now may be removed or altered depending on the evolution of the mod itself.

Added two new levels, a new E1M2 and a second secret level for Episode 1, E1SM2 (currently can only be accessed via console commands).

More shuffling of Episode 1's level order.

tweaked the Grenades from the Grenade launcher mode on the Missile Launcher to try to be more in line with the Grenades from Quake 1 and thus more user friendly.

Trees can now be destroyed for extra score points, the durability and score amounts on the trees will vary.

Thanks to Minigunner, the Officer's Pistol and Combat Shotgun now have proper DOOM hands.

The Lost Souls's explosive death's have been tweaked, making setting up chain reactions via multiple lost souls a more viable strategy for dealing with them.

Explosive Barrels now leave behind a little barrel stump as a matter of polish.

Fixed the missing gibbing sounds.

The Officer's Pistol and the Double-Barreled Shotgun now have better sound effects overall.

Spoiler: Beta 1, Revision 1

Added two new levels, a new E3M1 - Lest Darkness Falls and a new second secret level for Episode 3

Episode 1's and Episode 3's level order has been shuffled around a bit, most noticably E1M3 and E1M4 have swapped places

E2M1 has been slightly expanded

A (not so) new blood and gore system has been implemented. The variant of Nashgore currently used in DRLA (Thanks you Yholl for giving me permission to borrow it)

The Firing frames on the Combat Shotgun has been polished a little

The Double Barreled Shotgun's sprites has been replaced (again thank you Yholl)

The Assault Rifle's sprites has been replaced with Mike12's Assault Rifle sprites

A new Automap hud has been implemented (mostly to deal with a longstanding problem of the levelname being obscured on the automap)

The demon's leaping attack has been refined to be less janky, hopefully

The Argent Channeler's firing buildup has been sped up slightly

The Credits option is now "Guide & Credits" and now includes an brief ingame instruction manual touching on the premise, gameplay, items and weapons of the mod

Big Treasure Chests have been implemented, these are very rare and will spill goodies out when shot at. Green ones always spit out inventory items

After much consideration, The Eye of Ahriman has been removed from the mod due to it not really fitting the mod's overall weaponset and due to it being ultimately unsatisfying to use.

The Pickup flashes for the treasures have been tweaked to be transparent

The Powerup colour tints are now reduced from 0.30 to 0.10

A new inventory item has been added, The Discs of Repulsion from Hexen. Literally blast your enemies away!

Spoiler: Beta 1

Added two map,E3M4 - The Abyss and E3M6 - The Corrupted Monastery, bringing the Map count up to 21 Levels.

Completely overhauled the HUD yet again

The old bfg has now been replaced by the Argent Particle Cannon

Tweaked the monster's treasure drops

Score numbers now appear over a monster's corpse when you kill them, letting you know how many points you got from them.

Removed the Red Argent mode from the Argent Channeler

I have finally mastered CVARS, now there is an "Extra Options" menu, which currently allows one to disable the rain on certain levels and disable enemy projectile trails for those who may suffer performance drops from either one. The Extra options menu may expand in the future.

Several quality of life improvements, such as better cinematic camera handling in E2M2, brighter map lighting in E1M2, reduced the numbers of obstructions in E3M3 and E2M6's boss arena, and implementations of boss health meters on all boss maps

The Cyberdemon Lord (E2M6's Boss) now flashes red and beeps briefly before firing off his Railgun, giving advance warning and plenty of time to dodge out of the way.

The Mini-Cyberdemon has been completely removed from the Monster Roster

Nailguns and Rockets now pass through ghostly monsters (Spectres, Nightmare Imp, Nightmare Spectres) without damaging them, they are still damaged by the rocket's splash damage.

Improved the Missile Launcher's Grenade and DUMB mode respectively.

Mancubi now take extra damage from Nails fired from the Nailgun

Further expanded on and improved the Literal Chaos Device

The Egg of Pojo has been rebalanced and tweaked a bit, making it more satisfying to use.

The Eye of Ahriman close range attack has been rebalanced and tweaked a bit, making it more satisfying to use

A new smallfont has been implemented, special thanks to Jimmy for turning it into a useable smallfont.

Spectre's and Nightmare Demon's now briefly become fully visible when attacking

Nerfed the Mini-Cyberdemon by taking it's Grenade attacks away, leaving it with only Rockets

The Nailborg's nail grenades now beep and flash red for an extended period of time before exploding

Preliminary work has been undertaken on completely overhauling the Berserk replacement, it is now "Blade Power", which currently as of this time still does what the previous Berserksphere did but has it's graphic and pickup sound changed

Further visual improvements have made on the tracers fired by the Former Humans, Former Sargents, etc

Spoiler: Alpha 5.1

A playable preview of Episode 3's maps is now included (E3M1, E3M2 and E3SM1)

New (and rather convenient) keybinds have been added for the inventory items

The Archvile has been slightly buffed and tweaked in the following ways

His movement speed has been increased from 16 to 20 (and he now has a blur trail when moving)

He is now slightly taller than his Vanilla incarnation (without any actual tweaks to his hitbox)

He now performs his vanilla attack more often than his flame-line attack (and his flame line attack is faster)

breakable glass windows have been retroactively added to episode 1

the Seeker Cannon has been buffed in the following ways

It now does slightly more damage

and it's explosions now have a damage radius of 64 units, making it ideal for dealing with huge crowds of weak enemies

The Spider Mastermind now uses tracers instead of hitscans

The Were-Dragon now has a brief delay before it deploys it Fire Breath attack

Gargoyles and Afrits now have a visible smoke trail on their fireballs

Weapon Selection Priority has been fixed for all weapons. No more swapping to the Eye of Ahriman when you still have ammo for other weapons

Speaking of which, The Eye of Ahriman's Soul Essence ammo capacity has been doubled from 30 to 60

Spoiler: Alpha 4.9

Episode 1 and 2's maps are now packed into the PK3 due to obvious reasons ( )

The Fist has finally been replaced with a new melee weapon; The machete, which has a longer reach, faster damage per second and better damage overall than the Fist.

The BerserkSphere has been tweaked to account for the Fist being replaced.

Reduced the tracer damage of all Former Human, Former Sargents, Former Assault Troopers, and Former Commandos to be less OP and much more fair.

Spoiler: Alpha 4.8 Revision 2

reduced the number of shotgun ammo drops all over episode one's maps (I can't do much about episode 2's maps due to the way the pottery from Hexen is implemented, the underlying problem being that GZDoom Builder does not support arg0str outside of hexen for actors that inherit from the breakable pottery from hexen, so I end up having to edit the pottery and their drops in SLADE3. there's also a secondary problem where if I save a map that has the pottery with SLADE edited arg0str's in GZDoom Builder, GZDoom Builder will delete all the arg0str's I placed on the maps and it's a real pain in the arse to deal with since quite a few of E2's map have hexen pottery and/or actors that inherit from hexen pottery)

reduced the ammo of ammo gained from boxes of shotgun ammo from 20 to 16

tightened the spread of the double barrel shotgun to make it more useful

added pickup flashes for all the inventory items that didn't have em already

added special pickup flashes for the treasure

Spoiler: Alpha 4.8

Increased the firing speed of the heavy chaingun

buffed the regeneration sphere (by it's healing per second amount from 3 to 5 and by increasing the heal time from 30 seconds to 45 seconds)

fixed the crate lift in E1M3

fixed the bug with the death states for the gargoyles, did you know that the Gargoyles from Heretic actually don't call A_Scream or A_NoBlocking in their death states in vanilla heretic? apparently I needed to add A_ScreamAndUnBlock to both their Death and XDeath states and that is what was causing the problem with their corpses and the stairs in E1M5

added another regular exit in E1M2 that's much more easily found

did what I could about the crushers in E2M1

buffed the end fights of E2M4 and E2M5 respectively

nerfed the DPS of the enhanced arachnotrons

fixed some lingering problems regard E1SM1 and E2SM1

Spoiler: Alpha 4.?

A new chainsaw replacement has been added - The Eye of Ahriman. It's a weird one but it can be rewarding to use with sufficient mastery

all of episode 2 is ready to play

some re-balancing and more polish has been applied since the previous alpha

1. Some of the enemies seem way to powerful (Zombieman, Shotgunner, Chaingunner, and few, which I consider nitpicks), even if you're too far away from them.2. I think chaingun should fire a little faster to tell the difference between it and the Carbine, even though chaingun is stronger, while Carbine is more accurate (possibly nitpicking again)3. Some of the monster encounters are a bit bs, since they attack quicker than player reacts, but with the help of inventory items and score bonuses, it balances out a bit.4. Even though in alpha, the fire imps (gargoyles) from Heretic don't seem to be dropping any treasure to collect, enemies can shoot you through windows if you're close and this: https://my.mixtape.moe/reqeya.mp4

Other that that, I really enjoyed my time so far. The weapons are fun to use, each have their strengths and weaknesses, enemies are powerful, but beatable, maps are well detailed and expensive, and the score is a nice touch with its bonuses. Hoping for the full release. Good luck, man.

I beat both episodes. I thought this was cool and fun, and it's not often I get to play a project where I can jump over ammo that will overfill me. And now for some feedback (tested on Ultra-Violence):

- Like QDN Cz above mentions, the chaingun feels like the exact same thing as the submachine gun but with a windup and less accuracy. I didn't check to see if it did slightly more damage or anything since using one over the other wasn't really a problem most of the time.- There is way, way too much shotgun ammo. It takes thirteen shotgunners to bring you back to full shotgun shells, and that's with a backpack. The shotguns are weapons you can't really fire fast enough to warrant that much replenishment that fast, and even halving the amount shotgunners drop wouldn't detriment the supply. Compare to bullet weapons where bullets are fairly scarce until there are enough chaingunners to drop chainguns (10 of those fill you up, even less if those enemies also drop bullet boxes). - The regen powerup seems criminally useless. Either you're above 100 health thanks to all of the other pickups in the world or you're dead, practically. I didn't even know what the score bonus powerup that turned your screen purple did until the later levels, and 3 health per regen period seems kinda low. Can I suggest changing this powerup up so that it is still useful when you're above 100 health, a la High Noon Drifter's Spirit Bottle? Using that item as an example: restores health faster when below 100 (e.g. 5 every regen period), but gives minimal bonuses above 100 (e.g. 1).- This sector in E1M2 (the one with the torch in it) seems to be muted of all sound for whatever reason.- The crate lift in E1M3 can be activated by monsters, which leads to some amusing results.- Heretic Imp corpses apparently make stairs hard to traverse, as observed in E1M5.- I practically stumbled into E1's secret exit without ever finding the real exit. Conversely, E2's secret exit is pretty well hidden. I guess this speaks for the difficulty of either secret level, though.

The crushers in E2M1 are able to fall of their track and go straight through walls and kill the enemies.You're able to get stuck behind the two pillars in E2M2 (i see what you did with the level name )The final fight in E2M5 and E1M6 feel rather underwhelming, when you give the player too many power-ups, along with the BFG replacement, maybe give them some more health (?) [possibly nitpick, you may ignore it]The Super Arachnotrons are WAY TOO OP, they can pretty much insta-kill in some instances, nerf their damage outputAlso, the stairs in E2M5 need to stay down a bit longer, so players can make it in time

There's not much I can do about the polyobjects in E2M1 unless someone can show me what I'm doing wrong exactly, At the time I didn't remember the existence of the Restart; acs command for the script running the polyobjects and as a result had to resort to an ugly franken-hack of a method involving using a bastard hybrid of "boom scripting" and an active acs linedef

two pillars? I don't know what you are talking about. Please send a snapshot.

I'll see what I can do about it. Personally I though I did a good enough job with the episode boss, considering that the Cyberdemon Lord is legitimately deadly

I'll see what I can do about the DPS on the Enhanced Arachnotrons

it's supposed to be that way, you're supposed to be quick about entering them but I'll see what I can do

strange, I'll just have to fix those

Last edited by FireSeraphim on Wed Jan 24, 2018 8:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have gone ahead and fixed several problems and implemented several things suggested by the testers so far. This isn't a huge update but it will have to do until Episode 3 is released.

CHANGELOG

Increased the firing speed of the heavy chaingun

buffed the regeneration sphere (by it's healing per second amount from 3 to 5 and by increasing the heal time from 30 seconds to 45 seconds)

fixed the crate lift in E1M3

fixed the bug with the death states for the gargoyles, did you know that the Gargoyles from Heretic actually don't call A_Scream or A_NoBlocking in their death states in vanilla heretic? apparently I needed to add A_ScreamAndUnBlock to both their Death and XDeath states and that is what was causing the problem with their corpses and the stairs in E1M5

After playing through the first episode again on Ultra-Violence I couldn't find a single map where I was seriously deprived of shells because of this. There are enough drops in all those maps and enough ambient shotgun shell pickups to keep your shotguns fed, and this is not including the fact that you have at least 2 other ammo types to spend from at all times if you do run out of all 100 shells. Still playing through Ep. 2 again, and off the top of my head only one map allowed me to run out: the Ep. 2 secret map.

It also seems prudent to mention that I rarely if ever find myself using the double-barrelled shotgun. The combat shotgun provides a steady, controllable DPS at better range, while the DB seems more useful only for a surprise attack (rare those are) or on tightly-knit groups of weaklings. In fact, I should mention that the ton of Frost Ovums around will take out a big foe much faster than any shotgun - in addition to being great grenades to toss into a pit below you...

this is a rather small changelog, not enough for major revision change

CHANGELOG

reduced the number of shotgun ammo drops all over episode one's maps (I can't do much about episode 2's maps due to the way the pottery from Hexen is implemented, the underlying problem being that GZDoom Builder does not support arg0str outside of hexen for actors that inherit from the breakable pottery from hexen, so I end up having to edit the pottery and their drops in SLADE3. there's also a secondary problem where if I save a map that has the pottery with SLADE edited arg0str's in GZDoom Builder, GZDoom Builder will delete all the arg0str's I placed on the maps and it's a real pain in the arse to deal with since quite a few of E2's map have hexen pottery and/or actors that inherit from hexen pottery)

reduced the ammo of ammo gained from boxes of shotgun ammo from 20 to 16

tightened the spread of the double barrel shotgun to make it more useful

added pickup flashes for all the inventory items that didn't have em already